Seduced by the Sniper

Chapter Three

“You want to take a look at this?” Scott asked as Chelsie finally emerged from the bedroom.

He was set up at the old pine table in the kitchen, his laptop in front of him, and the file from the police station in DC open. He didn’t move his gaze from the screen as her footsteps slowly came toward him.

She stopped behind him, leaning over his shoulder, and a strand of soft blond hair brushed his arm before she tucked it away. “What is it?”

Her tone was wary, as if he’d been at fault for what had happened in her room fifteen minutes ago. But there was no way he’d have been able to not kiss her, the way she’d been staring up at him, longing in her big blue eyes.

He didn’t know what her game was. A year ago, she’d been anxious to come home with him. And, okay, she’d made it clear afterward that she wanted nothing more from him. But as soon as he’d seen her in the WFO parking lot, she’d broadcasted her desire like it was a neon sign.

He was only human. And she was the only woman he hadn’t been able to get out of his mind after he’d had her in his bed.

He’d tried hard, though, in the past six months. He’d gone from one fling to the next as though he was going for a record. And he was tired of it. One deep breath of Chelsie’s shampoo and he was right back where he’d been a year ago.

What had he been thinking, volunteering for this gig?

Scott moved to the side, so she could see his screen. A picture from inside her apartment living room filled his monitor.

She gasped and leaned closer. “What is this?”

“The cops who were called to the break-in took them. I asked them to email me the pictures so you could see if anything obvious was missing.” He twisted in his seat so he could look up at her, careful to keep his emotions off his face.

Bent down to scrutinize his computer screen, she was only a few inches away, her knee pressed against his leg. When she turned to him, her face was close to his and her pupils were huge.

He couldn’t help but smile. She wasn’t as immune to him as she wanted him to think.

Chelsie frowned, returning her eyes to the screen. “Not that I can see.”

Scott reached forward and clicked to the next image, this one a picture of her bedroom. The walls were a pale pink, her bedspread a thick, puffy white down, and there was actually a vanity with perfumes and jewelry in the corner. It was unbelievably girly, not at all what he’d expected Chelsie’s bedroom to look like.

Did she actually wear perfume and jewelry? Certainly not at the office, unless he counted the small gold locket she’d been wearing a year ago and had on now, paired with a crisp black blouse and wide-cut gray pants. Was there some lucky guy she actually changed out of her figure-hiding work clothes for, some lucky guy that made her dab on perfume and slip into a slinky dress?

He tried to ignore the thought and asked, “How about here?”

She shuffled her feet and her cheeks went red beneath the curtain of wheat-blond hair. Apparently she didn’t like him peering into her private life, into the apartment where she’d never invited him. “I don’t think so.”

He opened a few more pictures—her kitchen, her bathroom, even inside her closets—but each time, she shook her head.

He shrugged. “Worth a try. The cops didn’t think he messed with anything. The neighbors might have scared him off.”

“Or since I wasn’t home, there was nothing else that interested him,” Chelsie countered.

Scott nodded slowly. “It’s possible.”

Though as a trained marksman, the reality was, Connors could have set up on the roof of the apartment building across the street and waited for her to come home, then picked her off as soon as she got out of her car. Had he chosen to break in instead because he was on the run and couldn’t risk waiting? Or was it because he wanted to do more than just kill her?

Either way, Scott was grateful Connors had made that mistake, because it had forced the Bureau to act, to get Chelsie to safety.

“What are you thinking?” Chelsie asked.

He shook his head, not wanting to scare her. It didn’t matter what Connors was after; he wasn’t going to find it now.

“Scott...” Chelsie fiddled with her locket, avoiding his gaze. “About before...”

“Yeah?”

She scowled, finally looking into his eyes.

She’d probably wanted him to jump in, to say he understood, that it was a mistake, that it wouldn’t happen again. But he wasn’t going to make it so easy. Her feelings about him might be running cold right him now, but he had a feeling she’d swing hot again sooner or later. And when that happened, there was no way he’d be turning her down.

Chelsie flushed, as if she could read his mind, and stammered, “I—I think we need to forget about our history, okay? I’m sure Connors will be caught soon. And then you can get back to whatever you want to be doing right now.”

She didn’t know he’d volunteered to be on her protective custody detail? Instead of telling her, he turned back to his laptop. “Let’s go over the case file from last year.”

“What?” Chelsie jerked backward. “Why?”

He frowned up at her. “Because it might give us something useful.”

“What could it possibly give us?”

Scott narrowed his eyes, taking in the tight line of her lips, the furrow in her forehead, the clenching of her jaw. She didn’t want to see the pictures, he realized suddenly.

He understood it. He didn’t particularly like viewing crime-scene photos himself. But it went with the job. And Chelsie might have switched to white-collar crime, but he knew she’d started in counterterror. She’d probably seen photos of much worse.

Was it because she’d been there? He’d heard part of her testimony at Connors’s trial. He knew she’d tried to talk him down. But she’d arrived on the scene about sixty seconds before he killed everyone except her. Not exactly enough time to establish a connection and start up a dialogue. Not enough time to change his mind, or stall him until HRT could take him down.

As a trained negotiator, she should have known that. There were some personalities who were hell-bent on killing, and no dialogue, no matter how well thought out, could stop it. And this type of killer—a spree shooter—was usually one of them.

Most of them actually planned on dying themselves before the day was done, either by self-inflicted gunshot or “suicide by cop.” Connors might have had that plan in mind, too, but when he’d gotten the chance to run, he’d taken it. And when he’d been caught at a roadblock later that day, rather than lift the rifle lying across his lap, he’d been too cowardly to take his own life. Instead, he’d lifted his hands and stepped slowly out of his car.

“It wasn’t your fault, Chelsie,” Scott said softly.

“Of course not,” she replied, but he could tell she didn’t believe it.

“Is that why you stopped being a negotiator?” He’d known it was the Connors case, but he’d thought it was the reality of having to stand that close to the line of fire and watch people get killed. He’d thought it was the stress of it, the horror of seeing all that bloodshed up close and personal. Until now, he’d never suspected she’d blamed herself for any of it.

“Nothing from that day is going to reveal where Connors is now,” she said, sidestepping his question.

Scott stood and Chelsie moved away from him, looking wary.

“Come on, Chelsie. You can’t blame yourself for Connors’s actions.”

“I don’t,” she snapped, putting a hand up when he moved toward her. “I don’t want to talk about this with you, Scott. And I don’t think reviewing old crime-scene pictures is going to make any difference. There must be a state-wide APB out on Connors. They’ll catch him and we can both go home.”

She turned and hurried to her room before he could reply.

Scott sat back in his seat, staring blankly at his laptop. That was a lot of baggage to carry around—the deaths of nine military officers who’d left behind wives, children and, in one case, grandchildren.

In HRT, Scott had seen too many people die. It came with the job that sometimes by the time they could act, lives had already been lost. But it comforted him to know how many more were saved.

A sudden fury hit him. Connors had taken more than Scott had realized on that beautiful June day. Not only had he robbed nine men of their lives, he’d also stolen away a promising career.

Scott might not have seen Chelsie in action, but he’d heard enough about her from Maggie and some of the other agents at the WFO long before he’d taken her home. Even before she’d trained as a negotiator, she’d had a reputation as someone who could see to the heart of what a perp wanted and talk him into choosing a peaceful way to get it.

It was not a talent a lot of people had. He sure didn’t. He could take out a moving target at half a mile, but talking down a terrorist with a bomb strapped to his chest? That was a job he’d gladly leave to someone else.

Cursing under his breath, Scott pulled up the case file from last year. Chelsie might not want anything to do with it, but there was something about this whole situation that felt off to Scott. Something about Connors’s actions that didn’t add up. And the answer had to be in the original case, or in the trial testimony.

Wherever it was, he planned to find it. And hopefully, it would lead them to Connors.

Once they put Connors back behind bars where he belonged, Scott could turn to the next problem. And suddenly that wasn’t how to get Chelsie back in his bed, but how to convince her not to throw away her career as a negotiator.

And if she happened to fall for him again in the process, he wasn’t going to put up a fight.

* * *

FEAR PUMPED THROUGH Chelsie’s veins as she crouched outside the community center, pressed as tightly to the brick wall as possible. The roar of the rifle was all she could hear. Dead men lay in the parking lot, their blood slowly streaming toward her.

Her bullhorn was discarded across her lap, useless, as somewhere out there, Connors tried to center her skull neatly in his crosshairs. Chelsie crouched lower. Everyone was dead. She was a failure, a failure, a failure...

Bang!

The sound split through the air as Chelsie jolted upright, breathing too hard. Everything was dark, except for the light streaming toward her from the left, and it took her a minute to get her bearings, for her eyes to adjust.

She was in the bedroom in the safe house. She’d been sleeping, having the dream again—the one she thought she’d quit having six months ago. She wasn’t back at the community center with Connors trying to kill her. It was over. She was safe. As long as Connors didn’t find her again.

Scott stood in the open doorway, backlit from the hall. He held a laptop in his hands and his hair was sticking up on top. He seemed exhausted, but there was a sharpness to his expression that made her drag the covers up to her chin.

Which was ridiculous, since the cop who’d been called to the break-in at her apartment had packed her a conservative T-shirt and pajama shorts to sleep in. Scott had already seen her naked, already had his hands and mouth on just about every inch of her skin.

“What are you doing in here?” she croaked, glancing at the clock on the nightstand. She’d gone to bed hours ago, after eating a silent, awkward dinner with Scott. She’d thought he was asleep, too. Andre had woken up to finish off the rest of the cold pizza and take the next watch.

“I knocked,” Scott replied. “You okay?”

“Fine.” As he stepped into her room and flicked on the light, Chelsie squinted up at him. “Did they find Connors?”

“Not yet.”

She slumped against the headboard, dropping her covers. “Then what do you want?”

His gaze slid over her, and she squirmed as he moved closer, his steps slow and sure. His jeans and T-shirt fit his lanky body just right, made him seem laid-back and approachable while doing nothing to hide the bunching muscles underneath. It reminded her of how he’d looked in Shields a year ago.

It reminded her of exactly why she’d thrown thirty-four years of caution away and gone home with a near-stranger.

In a lot of ways, he was still a stranger. They’d talked in Shields, had discovered they could make each other laugh, that they had similar outlooks on their jobs. But once they’d left the bar, they hadn’t exactly passed the hours chatting. She could describe the birthmark on his upper thigh in minute detail, but she couldn’t say if he had any siblings besides Maggie, what he’d done before he’d joined the Bureau or how he spent his free time.

As he sat on the edge of her bed, sinking down on the springs, his weight shifting her closer to him, an ache filled her chest. She wished she did know those things. Maybe it wasn’t too late. She opened her mouth, wanting to ask him...something, but he spoke first.

“I want you to check out the crime-scene images.”

Chelsie sat up straighter, moving away from him as he held his laptop toward her. “What? Why? No.”

She sounded frantic, but she didn’t care. The nightmares were already starting up again. She didn’t need to study the crime-scene photos and make it worse, regardless of how much of a coward that made her seem.

She scowled, hating that Scott would see her that way now, too. He’d picked a job where he ran into the danger everyone else ran away from. He’d already seen her run away, from her job as a negotiator, and from him.

Steeling herself, she grabbed the laptop before she could change her mind. But there were no crime-scene photos on his screen, only a drawing with the details—distances, locations of the victims and the shooter— written in. Surprised, she glanced over the top of the screen at Scott.

He moved slightly, leaning against the headboard, and stretched his long legs across her bed.

There wasn’t enough room for both of them, and she found her legs pressed against his through the thin sheet, with nowhere to go. If she turned her head, raised it a little, his face would be right there. His lips would be right there.

Instead, she stared resolutely at the screen. “What am I looking at?” Her voice sounded too high-pitched, but if Scott noticed, he didn’t say anything.

Instead, he pointed to the spot on the drawing marked Suspect. “Connors was here.” He moved his finger to the spot right outside the community-center front door. Next to an X, it read FBI Special Agent Russell. “You were here?”

There was a tension in his voice she didn’t understand. “Yeah.” She glanced at him, and this close, she could see the individual whiskers on his chin, the tense lines between his eyes that she wanted to smooth.

“Not here?” He moved his finger from the left side of the U outside the community-center front door to the right side.

“No. Why?”

“Chelsie.” The worry in his voice deepened, and there was concern in the depths of his deep brown eyes. “Connors not firing at you wasn’t because he couldn’t.”

Chelsie’s pulse picked up. “What are you talking about?”

“Look where he is.” He pointed to the X marked Suspect again.

“So?”

“So, I ran the numbers. If they’re right, he did have a shot at you. He chose to let you live. He chose to let only you live.”

Chapter Four

Chelsie stared up at Scott, uncomprehending. “What do you mean, he let me live?”

“He had a shot, Chelsie,” Scott said quietly. “We found his shell casings. He was high enough on those bleachers. He could have hit you.”

“If that’s true, then why didn’t he?” Chelsie demanded, not wanting to believe it. “If he could have gotten me in his crosshairs, he would have killed me. He snapped. He was taking out anyone he could hit that day.”

“Apparently not,” Scott said.

She stared at him, noticing the deep circles underneath his eyes. Andre had said they’d been up for eighteen hours before they’d brought her to the safe house. And yet, instead of getting some sleep, Scott had reviewed the case file.

Chelsie felt something suspiciously like affection, and tried to ignore it. “Maybe you did the geometry wrong.”

Scott shook his head, but instead of being insulted, he just appeared exhausted. “It’s the same kind of calculations I do in my head every time I fire my rifle, Chelsie. I mess those up and I shoot a hostage instead of the perp. I could do them in my sleep. Trust me. I’m not wrong.”

“Then why didn’t they figure this out before?” she demanded.

“If you look at the building from ground level, you’d assume he didn’t have an angle on you. Even if you look at it from the bleachers, if you’d been on the other side of that enclosed area, he wouldn’t have been able to hit you. It was an oversight. And it made sense that he didn’t hit you because he couldn’t. But that’s not what happened.”

“Then what was he really after?” she whispered, moving away from him on her bed. But the mattress offered no support and she just slid back toward him until her body was pressed against his again.

It didn’t make any sense. Clayton Connors had been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after watching the rest of his unit die when an IED exploded under their vehicle. He’d gotten out of the military and gotten help—mostly in the form of very strong painkillers. Then, one day, he’d snapped and gone after military recruiters.

But the prosecution at his trial had made an airtight argument that Connors would have killed anyone he could have hit that day, that he’d actually planned on moving to a new location and killing again, until he’d been pulled over. It had been simple self-preservation that had kept him from raising a gun on the officers. A sudden fear of dying himself had landed him in jail instead of the morgue.

Chelsie threw her covers off and walked to the far side of the room. She crossed her arms over her chest, feeling strangely exposed in her T-shirt and shorts as she stared down at Scott, who was way too tempting stretched out in her bed. “The guy was crazy. Does it really matter why he didn’t shoot me?”

Even as she asked the question, she knew she was avoiding dealing with it. Connors letting her live on purpose didn’t fit with anything they knew about what had happened that day. And it didn’t track with the idea of him coming after her for a second chance, not if he’d never taken that first chance.

So what did he want with her? A shiver ran through her and she tensed, hoping Scott wouldn’t notice.

He put the laptop on her bed and walked over to her, stopping so close that she could’ve leaned forward and rested her head on his chest. “You’re the one who gets into people’s minds,” he argued. “You tell me if it matters.”

“That would be Ella. She’s the profiler.”

Scott gave her a look of disbelief. “Oh, come on. You were a good negotiator because you understand what people want. How did you do that without getting into their minds?”

“In case you forgot, I failed as a negotiator.”

“That’s not true,” Scott said. “Connors was a nutbag. You couldn’t have talked him down if you had thirty days, let alone the thirty seconds you probably got.”

She put her hands on her hips. “You just came in here to say that Connors wasn’t a nutbag. That he’d made the conscious choice not to shoot me, instead of being driven by some blind rage.”

Scott paused. It was a fraction of a second, but it was long enough.

“I don’t want to talk about my old job,” she said. “You’re the one who’s so sure he could have shot me. You must have far more experience with that kind of scene than I do. What’s your assessment?”

Scott frowned back at her. “Remind me not to wake you without a full night’s sleep again. You’re seriously cranky without your coffee.”

Chelsie’s shoulders slumped, her anger deflating. He’d stayed up reviewing the case when she’d refused to study it, and he’d taken on her protective custody when he probably could have passed it off to someone else. It wasn’t his fault talking about that day got her hackles up.

When she’d officially become an FBI negotiator, she thought she’d finally found her calling. Now, any reminder of her short-lived role in the specialty made every ounce of insecurity rise up. Including Scott. She’d probably never think about him without remembering the massacre, without remembering how she’d failed to prevent it.

She’d spent the past year trying to leave that memory in her past, and Scott with it.

Realizing that Scott was staring at her as though trying to read what was going through her head, she evened out her expression. “Sorry. Let’s talk about this in the morning then, after I get that coffee.”

He gaped at her. “The Chelsie I remember would want to jump right in.”

There was only one thing he would remember her jumping right into, and that was his bed. She scowled to hide her embarrassment, and snapped, “Don’t fool yourself, Scott. You never knew me.”

His eyes locked on hers, studying her too long, until she felt the need to fidget. “Maybe not,” he finally said, “but I don’t think I’m the one fooling myself right now.” Before she could respond, he turned and walked out of the room.

When the door shut quietly behind him, Chelsie sank back onto the bed, feeling angry and sad and vaguely ashamed of herself. What was that supposed to mean? She was somehow fooling herself?

The laptop he’d left behind had slid toward her as the mattress sank under her weight. She glanced at the screen, still lit up with the drawing of the community center’s front parking lot.

If Scott was right—and as an HRT sniper, chances were, he was—then why hadn’t she died with everyone else at that community center a year ago? And if Connors had let her live back then, why was he after her now?

* * *

“I’M SORRY.”

Scott blinked at the light streaming in from the hallway, even though he’d been awake from the second Chelsie had started tiptoeing down the hall. She stood in the doorway of his bedroom, holding his laptop. She’d changed into a pair of jeans and a T-shirt—this time, unfortunately, with a bra underneath. She did seem contrite. She also looked uncomfortable. Because she didn’t like to apologize or because he slept in nothing but boxer shorts, he wasn’t sure.

After he’d left her room, he’d asked Andre to take over the watch, deciding to get some much-needed sleep. He’d figured by the morning, she’d have come to grips with what he’d shared. And hopefully she’d be less defensive.

Scott rubbed his eyes and yawned, making her apologize again. But not before she glanced at his bare chest and then quickly back up.

“It’s okay.”

He expected her to turn and go back the way she’d come, but instead she stepped farther into his room. She settled on the very edge of his bed, setting his laptop between them, like some kind of barrier.